trusted D'Amato's evaluation and his intuition, and he released Atlas on pro- bation under the condition that he live and work with D'Amato at his house and training camp upstate, in Catskill. Teddy was nineteen; D'Amato was in his late sixties. D'Amato was by then semi-retired; he was past thinking he'd ever train an- other champion, but he enjoyed taking in young fighters. He filled them with his cracker-barrel philosophies: that a fighter has to convert his fears into strength, that he cannot afford to lie to himselE He looked a great deal like Rod Steiger, but in the corner he sounded not a little like Burgess Meredith in "Rocky:" At times, D'Amato made his accommodations with the sleazy boxing world, but he also kept clear of men like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo, the mobsters who controlled nearly every champion and contender of their era. Sportswriters loved him. Teddy Atlas came to love him, too. Atlas won a Golden Gloves title, but he would go no further as an athlete; he had a bad back. "For some obscure reason, D'Amato saw Atlas as a trainer, a teacher, and put him in charge of the day-to-day training at his gym. In 1980, Tyson came to Catskill from the Tryon School for Boys, an upstate re- form school, and D' Amato gave him to Atlas to train. Tyson was thirteen years old, a hundred and ninety pounds, and soon D'Amato was talking about him as the next heavyweight champion of the world. There is no overstating the emotional bond that grew up between Tyson and Atlas. In Brooklyn, where Tyson lived as a child, and then in re- form school, no one had ever paid him much attention, no one had ever cared enough about him to teach him, to put limits on him. After some bouts, Ty- son and Atlas would kiss. When Tyson started crying before an amateur fight in Colorado Springs, Atlas knew just the right words to get him into the ring. The job was to harness his ferocity and con- fine it to the ring and, at the same time, keep together a fragile psyche. D'Amato came to admire Atlas. Not only was Atlas taking good care of T y- son, bringing him along, fight by fight; he also saw how dedicated Atlas was to his lesser fighters, how he would drive them every week in a borrowed station 150 THE NEW YOR.KER., AUGU5T 21 & 28, 2000 wagon to a gym on Westchester Ave- nue, in the South Bronx, for Saturday- night "smokers," thrown-together ama- teur bouts, that helped raise their skills, their experience, their self-esteem. The place in the Bronx smelled of sweat and urine and cigar smoke, and at times the referee was drunk, and customers gambled on the fights, but it was worth it: the kids were learning. Sometimes, Atlas had to struggle to get D' Amato to notice. "Cus would be watching 'Barney Miller' and 'M*A*S *H' all the time over at the house while I was in the gym till ten every night," Atlas said. "I'd beg him to come. I'd sa)', 'Cus, fuck "Barney Miller"! Come to the gym! Look at this.' And fi- nally he saw that we had thirty kids and fifteen of them were pretty good. And he said, tlas is a teacher.' And that made me feel really good." For a while, Atlas saw Cus D'Amato as his surrogate father, a more present and expressive father. In all his years in Catskill, Atlas never got a salary, but still he was convinced that he was get- ting an invaluable education from a master and, together with D'Amato, building something important. The problem was Tyson. They were split- ting over Tyson. As he got older, Tyson developed a sense of invulnerability. He could do anything. When he got in trouble in school for threatening a teacher or harassing girls (and that was often), Atlas would try to discipline him by suspending him from the gym, but then he would be overruled and under- mined by D' Amato. The way Atlas saw it, D'Amato was cutting corners for Tyson, because, above all, he wanted one last champion, one more before he died. Nothing mattered as much, including his principles. While Atlas was in Catskill, he had married a local girl named Elaine. They moved out of D' Amato's house and were ,fA1r living in a small apartment in town. One day in 1982, Atlas came home and saw Elaine and her eleven-year-old sister sit- ting at the kitchen table crying. They told Atlas that Tyson, who was then sixteen, had come on to the girl, had touched her, demanded things from her, sexual things. Atlas left the apartment in a rage. He was convinced that Tyson knew exactly what he was doing: by as- saulting Teddy's eleven-year-old sister- in-law, he was flaunting his power over the girl and over Atlas. "This was evil," Atlas told me. "That was taking what no one has a right to take. Sometimes it's better to take some- one's life than the life within them." Atlas went to a friend, a night-club owner in town. "I knew he had a gun. It was a .38 revolver. I flicked it open, made sure it was loaded, stuck it in my waist- band, and left." In the late afternoon, he worked with his young fighters and then waited around, thinking about what to do. It was getting dark. By chance, a cab pulled up in front of the gym, and Tyson got out. "1 was gonna do whatever I had to do. I was gonna make sure he understood what he'd done, what it meant to peo- ple-to real people-and that he would never do it again." Tyson came toward Atlas, and Atlas grabbed him by the head and pulled him into an alley outside the gym. He drew the gun and jammed it hard into Tyson's ear. "1 said, 'You piece of shit! You piece of shit. Don't you ever put your hands on my family: I will kill you. Do you under- stand this?' If he would have smiled, if he would have said no, I would have killed him. And I would have lived with that. I'm not saying that's right, but at that time that's what it was for me. When I wasn't sure how to save his life, how to give him a chance, 1 pulled the gun away from his ear and pulled the trigger. I fired. At that moment, he kne He got very weak. I could see that in his eyes. That was to let him know this wasn't anything other than what it was. His ear was probably ringing pretty hard and he fell backward a little. . . . Cus had never let Tyson know that the trungs he was doing to people were real. I was letting him know" D'Amato's way of solving the prob-